Saturday, January 1, 2011

New Year's Day

Even though it's titled War, U2's third album has been described as “the record where the band turned pacifism into a crusade”. Of all the songs in the album, two stand out particularly: Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day. The first one is about a terrible incident in Northern Ireland in which a group of civil rights defenders were shot by the British Army with a result of fourteen dead people. The other song, New Year's Day is about the Polish social movement Solidarity, which in the early 1980s started a fight in favour of workers' rights against the communist government.

Almost 30 years later, this song can still be heard without losing any freshness and can rightfully be termed as a classic.